Batman and Dracula: The Collaborations of Jack Smith and Andy Warhol

Callie Angell was the longtime curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the world’s foremost authority on the artist’s films. On 29 October 2009, she delivered a heavily illustrated lecture about the collaborations of Jack Smith and Andy Warhol at the Arsenal cinema in Berlin in the context of LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World, a festival of films, performances, and lectures that was curated by Susanne Sachsse, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, and Marc Siegel for the Arsenal and the HAU/Hebbel am Ufer Theater. Before her death in 2010, Angell agreed to publish a version of her talk in this special issue of Criticism. In agreeing to do so, she acknowledged that the editorial work on such an image-heavy presentation would be complicated. Her presentation focused on Smith and Warhol’s seminal and almost mythical film collaboration Batman Dracula (1964). Angell generously displayed and commented on images from every role of the almost seven hours of footage from this unfinished film project. Although we are obviously unable to reproduce every image from her talk, we are interested in retaining as much information about the footage as possible in the text that follows. The film has not been preserved and will likely remain unavailable for researchers for some time. Angell’s comments on and descriptions of the material therefore provide significant—otherwise unavailable—insight into the nature and scope of this most unusual collaboration between these two seminal artists. Ellipses indicate omissions from the original manuscript. I am extremely thankful to Claire K. Henry, Angell’s former assistant and, currently, the Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney Museum of American Art, for her careful work in editing this text for publication. I also thank the Whitney Museum of American Art and Roger Angell for their permission to publish it.

—Marc Siegel

On 3 March 1965, David Ehrenstein interviewed Andy Warhol at the Factory while Warhol was in the process of shooting Screen Tests of the poets Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard. Warhol was rather preoccupied with his filmmaking and was giving simple, rather childish answers to Ehrenstein’s questions. When asked, “Who in the New American Cinema do you admire?” Warhol replied, “Jaaaacck Smiiiitttth” (which is transcribed in Film Culture with four As, two Cs, four Is, and four Ts). “You really like Jack Smith?” Ehrenstein asked, apparently with some surprise.

AW:

When I was little, I always thought he was my best director . . . I mean, just the only person I would ever try to copy, and just . . . so terrific and now since I’m grown up I just think he makes the best movies.

DE:

What in particular do you like about his movies?

AW:

He’s the only one I know who uses color [and here appears a pause that consists of two whole lines of dots . . .] backwards.¹

I imagine entire generations of Warhol scholars have been mystified by this quote. Is Warhol being serious? Does he really like Jack Smith, or is he making fun of him? What on earth does it mean to use color backwards? And what did Jack Smith think of Andy Warhol? One piece of evidence, an undated handwritten note that turned up on display at the Jack Smith retrospective at MoMA PS1 in New York in 1997, is unequivocal:

I am only thankful that God has made it possible for ME to purify the projectors after these Warhol films. I am sorry you have to pay $4.00 to see it especially since in NY the novelty of the so called “Art” of Warhol is definitely finished and what you are paying for is PUBLICITY.

Jack Smith and Andy Warhol were two extraordinary, unique, and very different artists. In some ways, they are almost polar opposites—Warhol was, of course, the originator and the master of the commodified art object, turning out multiples of paintings and sculptures in a studio he called the Factory, often deliberately obscuring his authorship of these works, and...